Point of Contact

Paul Brown played poker in college, shaking down wealthy Greeks in their smoke-filled fraternity basements and beer-soaked-carpeted game rooms across the Iowa State campus. He made enough to cover his books and tuition for two years and stopped only when a three-hundred-pound lineman threatened to break his spine after Paul relieved him of five hundred dollars in a single hand.

His keen numbers brain allowed him to accurately calculate the odds in a hand, but he excelled at the game because he knew that in poker you don’t play the cards, you play the man, and Paul had developed the world’s stoniest poker face. A poker face he had used to great effect today.

The first time he used it was when Bai appeared in the office with the encrypted USB drive Yong had promised and handed it to Paul. He took it as nonchalantly as if Bai had handed him a glass of tepid tap water. Inwardly, Paul was dancing for joy. He was now decidedly one step closer to fulfilling his mission for the CIA.

Coolly and calmly, Paul began downloading data from the Dalfan computer to the Dalfan USB, then loading that data onto his laptop. His own machine didn’t require the encrypted passcodes on the Dalfan drive, so it ignored them.

Bai tried stealing glances over Paul’s shoulder every now and then, on the pretense of stretching or fetching hot tea or office supplies. Bai’s job obviously was to get a sense of the kinds of files Paul was pulling down, but Paul shifted around in his chair and adjusted his posture to keep Bai at bay, and when that failed, he simply turned to the young accountant and said, “I’m sorry, but I need my privacy.”

That was enough to get Bai to back off, but Paul knew that Bai wasn’t his only problem. Someone in the Dalfan accounting department was likely monitoring his work. If it were him, he would’ve set up some kind of remote mirroring program — the same kind that allows a technical-support person in Bangalore to conduct remote repairs on a client’s computer in Baltimore. Every file he opened, and every data set he pulled down from the Dalfan desktop, would’ve been seen and probably recorded by the remote observer.

That was fine by Paul, because the important work he needed to do he accomplished on his private machine. Unfortunately for Dalfan, the security protocols that prevented Paul from logging on to their machines prevented Dalfan from logging on to his machine. Air-gapping worked in both directions. Acquiring the encrypted Dalfan USB drive allowed him to download their data onto his secure laptop.

But the real reason why he wanted the drive was the drive itself. As soon as Bai left the room for his first bathroom break, Paul plugged the Dalfan drive into one of his laptop USB ports and screen-grabbed the make and model and stored it in a file. He needed that information if he wanted to go out and buy a duplicate one. He wasn’t sure that he even could; at this point, he was still improvising. Unfortunately, he still didn’t have any idea how to defeat the Dalfan drive’s encryption.

In the meantime, he needed to keep his hand to the plow and try and find any fraud in the Dalfan books. He got back to his auditing work.

* * *

As the day wore on, Paul’s proprietary auditing screens had come up negative in his searches. For the most part, Dalfan appeared to be a well-run and highly profitable company. Yong and his team had done an excellent job organizing and maintaining their general ledger over the last five years.

Bai’s eyes continued to flit between his own screen and Paul. Paul hid his disappointment behind his poker face. The joy of the job of a fraud examiner was the discovery of actual fraud. The hunter who came home from the field without the kill, or the lothario who didn’t have a woman to bring home to his bed, hadn’t the faintest glimmer of the kind of disappointment Paul felt when he couldn’t find the clues he needed to uncover the criminal act. But Paul felt it was generally bad form for a CFE to show that kind of disappointment when no fraud was found at a reputable firm, just as it was bad manners to gloat excessively when a crime was finally discovered.

It had taken him years to realize that he loved the job because it was exactly like a game of poker, only harder, playing against a brilliant but unseen opponent holding a million invisible cards. Paul’s job was to play the man — or woman — but first he had to find out what the cards even were and to see what kind of hand his opponent was playing.

After he and Bai went to lunch in the Dalfan cafeteria and devoured steaming bowls of dumpling soup and heaping plates of chicken and rice, Bai returned to one of his video games and Paul resumed his game of blind poker.

An hour later, Bai glanced up from his screen. “Everything okay, Mr. Brown?”

Paul Brown the poker player shrugged, fighting the joy welling up inside of him. One of Paul’s more mundane search screens had just signaled a hit.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Find anything yet?”

“No. So far, everything looks fine.”